


Rain and a Dead Guy

by singing_to_empty_caves



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Friendship, Haunting, Romance if you squint, dan got stood up, emo ghost from the 19th century, ghost - Freeform, phil the friendly ghost, this underwent 0 editing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-07 00:40:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18399611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singing_to_empty_caves/pseuds/singing_to_empty_caves
Summary: Phil died in the 19th century. He had nothing to do with his home getting bulldozed, or another house built in the same place, or a man named Dan moving into that new house, or with his unbreakable ties to that particular spot of land. However, Dan still thought he should've been more tactful about popping into the kitchen out of thin air.





	Rain and a Dead Guy

It’d been a long day for Dan Howell, and he was absolutely exhausted. Not only had there been unwarranted drama when he’d gone to pick up dinner--what right did that man have to tear Dan down for wearing nail polish?--but it was absolutely pouring outside, and he hadn’t bothered to check the forecast before leaving the house, and that had left him soaking wet and dripping on the tile floor just inside the front door. He tried to be grateful that the plastic bag he carried had protected his cardboard box from getting soggy, but it was far too difficult to be grateful for anything when a couple of stubborn curls kept dropping water unexpectedly onto his eyelashes.

Maybe the evening would get better, if he could manage to enjoy his microwave dinner as much as he had previously planned to enjoy his dinner out with the woman he’d met near a month ago. Sophia, she’d said, and he realized suddenly that in a month’s time he had never learned her last name. They’d just stumbled into each other over and over, at the park, on the street, in line at the store, until they’d finally declared it to be fate and agreed to a date.

Typically, you don’t get jealous over one cancelled date, even if you did see the person in a coffee shop obviously flirting with someone else, even if she did call you David and not Dan when she called the evening off. Maybe Dan was just that starved for the attention of another human being. Probably, he’d been too eager or desperate and put her off.

No matter what the reasons were, he’d felt like takeout was just a little bit too low to sink, and that was how he’d ended up at the store for food to cook himself. Unfortunately, he’d lost all will to do anything productive, and it was only his anxiety over walking out of the grocery store without buying anything--looking suspicious, or snobby, or something--that caused him to buy a frozen dinner.

Sophia might have taken someone else out for dinner. She was pretty enough to get a date. Dan, however, was putting a black plastic tray in the microwave and considering which show to binge.

When the machine hummed to life, Dan turned around to pour a glass of water, but instead found himself shouting at the top of his lungs and backing away a couple of steps from the man that most definitely was _not_ in his kitchen two minutes ago, or even familiar enough to him to warrant being inside of the house at all.

“What are you doing here?” Dan demanded.

“Sorry, sorry!” the man apologized frantically. “I’ve meant to introduce myself for a while, but I could never figure out how I wanted to do it, and--”

“--and you chose to _break into my house_ to say hello?! I’m calling the police!”

The man cringed. “It won’t help. They’ll think you’re crazy.”

“Yeah? I’m not the one standing in a stranger’s kitchen.” Dan pulled out his phone.

“Okay, look, I’m going to show you why that won’t work, but you have to promise me you won’t freak out.”

“Oh, you think I’m not freaking out right now? How do I know you didn’t steal something? Or that you haven’t got all of my passwords from my computer?”

The man sighed, and Dan tried to dial on the phone. After significant difficulty keeping his screen dry enough to operate efficiently, he looked up to make sure the criminal hadn’t started rifling through his kitchen cabinets--and swore very loudly as he took off running to look for the man who’d just disappeared somewhere.

“How’d you move so quickly?!” Dan yelled, already running out of breath.

“I didn’t.”

Dan turned on the spot to find the same man behind him again, this time standing next to the sofa.

“What are y--you know what, I won’t call the police, just _leave my house_ already!”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you…”

Dan trailed off as the man disappeared again. It wasn’t figurative. One moment, he was there, and the next, Dan was alone.

As soon as Dan had hesitantly put away his phone, the man reappeared. Just the way he’d left--blink, and he was back. He at least had the decency to look awkward and ashamed.

“I should’ve known I’d screw it up,” the man laughed, seeming to downplay his embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I really couldn’t think of a good way to do this. I just didn’t want you to call someone, you know, because you’re the only one who can see me, because you live here. I wanted to spare you the awkwardness… but that sort of backfired.”

Dan stared at him for a few seconds longer before he let out a long breath and decided to listen to this guy, because honestly, he was right--it wouldn’t do any good to call the police, unless he wanted to look absolutely insane.

“All right, so who are you?”

The man seemed to lose tension, probably relieved that Dan wasn’t going to continue harassing him. “My name’s Philip. Eugh, that sounds so stuffy now. It’s funny, I’ve started thinking the way you speak instead of the way I did… wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m a… ghost. I think. Probably. I was born in 1838.”

“Are you serious? You think I’d believe that? You don’t exactly sound like you’ve been dead a while.”

“What, did you want me to act like I’ve been quarantined from society since the 19th century? This is a new house, but it’s still my property, and I’ve been here the whole time--watching people live their lives. I can’t exactly leave, but I watch TV and all, and I do try not to eavesdrop on your conversations, but it’s hard to avoid them without going into your bedroom--I don’t like going in there, that’s _your_ room, I never lived in this house--”

“Shut up, Philip. Has anyone ever told you that you ramble?”

“Well, yeah, but not for maybe 150 years.”

Dan was still trying to take in what was going on--and trying very hard to give Philip the benefit of the doubt by suspending his disbelief in ghosts--and decided he just needed to sit down for a bit. After all, he only needed to put down a blanket to soak up the excess water from his clothes, and the rest could wait.

He walked around the side of the sofa, but stopped before sitting down. He blinked, glanced back at Philip.

“Can you sit down?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was bothering you--”

“No, Philip, I meant it literally. Are you able to sit on my furniture?”

He shrugged. “I think so. I’ll try, I mean.”

Dan watched him carefully lower himself onto the sofa. It was kind of funny, the way his face lit up when he realized he wasn’t going all the way through the seat.

“I guess I can!”

Dan was about to join him, but he remembered his dinner, probably getting cold in the microwave.

“I’m gonna go get my dinner. Um… if you can eat or drink…”

Philip shrugged, still smiling. “I don’t know, I haven’t tried it. You don’t have to give me anything, though, I don’t exactly get hungry.”

“Well, yeah, but haven’t you missed food since you, you know… died?”

“Sort of. I don’t actually remember most of it anymore, I guess just because it’s been so long since I’ve had anything to eat.” Philip’s eyes darted from Dan to the kitchen. “I have wondered, though. About your food. Are there really places to drive through and get food without even going inside?”

“Yeah, but aren’t you surprised about cars before drive-throughs? I might be wrong, but I don’t think there were really any cars 150 years ago.”

“Oh, there weren’t. But I can actually see out the windows, and I’ve seen TV, and I’ve sort of gotten used to it.”

Dan tried to figure out how Philip could be so nonchalant about how much the world had changed, but quickly gave up, seeing as he had no other ghosts to compare Philip to. Instead, he continued into the kitchen and grabbed his dinner. As was probably to be expected, it wasn’t quite so warm anymore. He put it back into the microwave and set a short time, knowing it would either prove to be way too long or leave the center colder than the rest of it.

When the microwave began its noise again, Dan heard Philip say, “Is that the… thing? You know, the fast oven?”

Dan walked to the corner so that he could see Philip. “Yeah. It’s called a microwave. Why don’t you know that word, if you know so many others?”

“You don’t usually talk out loud about it when you’re at home alone cooking food. How does it work? You know, how does it heat up so quickly?”

“The microwave itself doesn’t heat up,” Dan tried to explain. “It sends waves through the air inside that make the food heat up.”

“What?”

“I’ll see if I can find a better explanation,” Dan mumbled as he pulled out his phone again--but Philip seemed even more interested in that.

“Yeah, that thing does everything, doesn’t it?” Philip declared enthusiastically. “Just the quick letters are amazing! You’re so lucky. If I could’ve asked my mum about cooking while I was doing it, I wouldn’t have burnt nearly as much food!”

“Do you read my texts over my shoulder?!”

Philip, once again, looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry! I know I shouldn’t, and I really do try not to, but I get bored! I can’t exactly read a book off your shelf--and it’s hard enough staying sane when I have to sit in an empty house for hours on end when you’re gone!”

“Yeah, okay. Just avoid that in the future,” Dan sighed as he went to retrieve his dinner before it got cold again.

He returned to the living room, and Philip was still sitting on the sofa, staring awkwardly at the floor. He looked up when Dan pulled a blanket over his intended seat, but quickly set his eyes back on the polished wood around his feet as Dan actually sat down.

Dan took a few bites of his food in silence, trying not to be obvious about taking in Philip’s appearance. Knowing what he did now, he thought he should’ve been more observant at first and noted Philip’s clothes. They didn’t seem old in the sense of having degraded or discolored, but they were as wrinkled as any clothes would’ve been if someone wore them for a century and a half. He thought the strangest part was that he’d seen a man in nice pants and a fancy vest and immediately written him off as a garden-variety home intruder. Maybe it was the hair--cut close on the sides and flipped up at the front, it didn’t seem very much like someone from the 1860s. That was, if he’d guessed Philip’s age correctly.

“Philip?”

“Yeah?”

“Did your hair look like that before?”

Philip shook his head. “No, it looked absolutely awful all my life. You know, you don’t think about how horrible things look until you’ve had a decade or two to get past whatever trend you were following.”

“I know how that feels,” Dan agreed. “Just before I moved in here, I stopped straightening my hair. I used to think it had to be perfectly straight, and so long that it got in my eyes. Believe it or not, that was a huge thing when I was a teenager.”

“Actually, I saw that. Not you,” Philip reassured him quickly. “At least a few years before you moved in, the first people to live in this house decided to move away. I can’t remember what year it was exactly, but there was a couple. This girl was in her twenties, and she insisted on dyeing her hair black and cutting it into this odd… feathery… _thing._ I saw guys with hair like you described on TV, when she watched music videos. Was that what it was? People liked that sort of music, and they wanted to look like the musicians?”

Dan couldn’t help laughing just a little. Here was this man, talking like he was easily from this year, but for some reason, seeing a man in fancy clothes call emo bands “musicians” was hilarious to him.

“Yeah,” Dan sighed at the end of a laugh. “We all wanted to be cool and edgy and dark.”

Philip shrugged. “Well, you know, I tried it, too.”

Dan stopped for a moment. “Wait, you mean you did your hair like that?”

“Yeah, the same way I mess with it now. Turns out I can actually take things from, you know, your side, and if I hold them in my hands for long enough, they cross over to me. I found that out when the people who lived here went out for lunch, and I snuck into the hallway bathroom and took the dye the woman was about to use. I was trying to figure out how I could use it without some kind of problem--I don’t know, my first thought was that since the dye was real, it wouldn’t disappear when I did--but after about a half hour of pacing and trying to figure it out, the box just felt _different,_ and… I had hair dye.”

Dan examined Philip’s hair, but couldn’t find any evidence of it being dyed. There weren’t any visible roots, and he couldn’t spot any stains from recent dye.

“How often do you dye it?” Dan found himself asking.

“Actually, it was only the one time. My hair doesn’t grow anymore, so once it was all black, that was it.”

Dan raised an eyebrow at Philip. “Your hair doesn’t grow back, and you decided to cut yourself an emo fringe?”

“It wasn’t like anyone was going to see it if I messed up!”

“What did you use? Did you steal crafting scissors?”

Philip pouted at Dan. “Well, yeah! I only had access to whatever I could find in the kitchen drawer. They didn’t exactly have a barber shop in the bathroom.”

“That’s fair.” Dan looked over Philip’s current haircut once again. “You did pretty well turning it into something else, though. Was it too awkward to turn back into something like you had before?”

Philip laughed. “Dan, I told you already, my hair when I was alive was a mistake. In fact, a lot of things are really horrible, looking back. These clothes make me look like an old man now!”

“Well, I can give you new clothes,” Dan offered.

“No, I’m not going to take your clothes and make them permanently corporeal.”

“We’ll see what you say after I show you all of the things I hardly wear.”

Dan stood up and held out a hand to Philip to help him up. Philip must’ve taken it out of habit, but Dan quickly yanked his hand away, instinctively avoiding the freezing feeling of contact with a ghost. Ghosts were cold, that was new information.

“I’m sorry!” Philip apologized, on his feet regardless. “Did that hurt?”

“No, it was just _cold,_ ” Dan complained. “Phil, you’re going to give me frostbite.”

“Phil?”

“Yeah, Phil. Did that work? I just couldn’t stand Philip anymore. You were right, it sounds stuffy.”

Phil nodded slowly, a bigger smile forming. “I like it. I do! Phil.”

“All right, Phil. Do you want to find some new clothes, or do you want to learn about the microwave first?”

“Honestly? The clothes. I’m far too excited to listen to some boring explanation right now.”

“All right.”

Dan led Phil down the hall and into his room. As Dan went into his closet to dig out the shirts he hadn’t touched in years, Phil stood beside the bed and watched.

“You said you’d meant to introduce yourself for a while,” Dan recalled aloud, voice echoing off the walls of the closet. “Why tonight?”

Phil might’ve sighed, or shifted around, but the sound of clothes rustling in Dan’s hands blocked out the quieter noise from the rest of the bedroom.

“I know I shouldn’t have been reading from your phone, but I saw some of the things you said to Sophia,” Phil explained. “I knew you were supposed to spend the evening with her, and that you were quite excited for it. Of course, when she cancelled, I expected you to be a bit hurt, but you seemed to have some kind of plan when you left the house. I really did want to leave you to it, but I watched you come in soaking wet, and you just looked so _sad_ … I thought you might need company, that’s all. I guess it might not have been a good idea to show up and tell you there’s been a ghost living with you for the past two years… Next time you’re having a bad night, call someone, all right? Call a friend. Don’t… wander around your house all wet and cold and sad. Wait--I’m an idiot! You need to put on some warm clothes, you’ll catch a cold!”

Dan didn’t have time to process a ghost suddenly turning into a mother hen--he had to catch the sweater Phil shoved into his arms, and then the jeans, and then the freezing hands grabbed his shoulders--he moved quickly to the bathroom to avoid Phil trying to steer him there and turning his skin blue.

Thankfully, he had his life together enough to have clean towels in the bathroom, and he was able to soak up more of the water from his now-wild hair. He had to admit, too, that wrapping himself up in a sweater felt a lot better than wandering around in a soaking T-shirt. The only issue was that Phil had chosen his least favorite jeans (the pair that Dan had, as all people do, which was just not as good as the others). Still, it was all right, because these weren’t destroying his skin with every step he took.

Dan shouldn’t have been surprised that Phil was just outside the door, but he startled regardless. “Phil, really, could you stop just appearing at every corner?”

“I wasn’t going to stay in your room. I told you, I don’t like invading your space.”

“You live in my house, and you don’t pay rent. That’s still invading my space,” Dan reminded him, but it wasn’t as cold, irritated, or confrontational as the things he’d said when the two first met.

Phil shrugged. “I can’t help being here, you know. It wasn’t my fault that they knocked down my house and built this one for you to move into. I’ve just tried to make the best of things.”

Dan rolled his eyes, but couldn’t help a smile. “You’re a very endearing ghost, you know. You’ve gone through an emo phase, you’re looking after me when I’m upset, you’re apologizing for being tied to the mortal world…”

“Well, I’ve got to get on your good side if I want to learn to play Mario Kart,” Phil joked.

Dan actually enjoyed Phil’s bright expression a lot more than he would’ve thought, and he made a resolution to sacrifice a controller to the great beyond in order to figure out whether his Switch would still recognize it. He hoped it would--Phil had spent, apparently, far too long watching video games from the sidelines.

“Is that why you’re being so nice to me?” Dan replied, feigning hurt. “In that case, you can wear your grandpa clothes for the rest of eternity.”

“No!” Phil giggled, rushing back to Dan’s bedroom door and waiting for Dan to join him.

They entered the room together, and an hour later, Phil had finally brought the clothes to the other side. Dan thought it was fascinating. Phil could interact with tangible things in Dan’s house, but he himself had a very faint… _distinction._ He seemed just not quite right. He wasn’t glowing, or translucent, but there was definitely something odd. It had been a strange experience to watch the new clothes shift nearly imperceptibly into Phil’s separate plane of existence.

“Well, I hope you like those, because you can’t give them back,” Dan informed Phil.

“I do, actually. Thank you, Dan!”

Dan glanced around the room. “Uh, Phil… do you need somewhere to sleep? Do you even sleep at all?”

Phil shrugged. “I can. I don’t need to, but I still can.”

Dan nodded and left the room, very aware of Phil following. He opened a closet and grabbed a blanket, and brought it to the living room. The wet blanket hit the floor with a sigh from Dan. As he attempted to arrange a temporary bed from the couch, a throw pillow, and the blanket, Phil stepped around Dan and watched.

“You’re sure you don’t mind me being here?” Phil asked again.

“No, it’s actually kind of nice so far. Creepy, unexpected, but I’m getting used to it.”

Dan looked out the window at the still-raging rain, and then back at Phil.

“No chance I’m going out there right now, but tomorrow I might see if you can bring food across the walls of mortality. You’ve seen what I eat--take your pick.”

Phil grinned wide, and Dan realized that he much preferred this over some awkward date at a restaurant. Here, there was no concern for etiquette, and he’d made a friend who clearly didn’t mind his mess of a personality.

He had nothing to prove to Phil. The ghost had known him for years, seen him at his least attractive, and still chose to be Dan’s friend. Of course, there would be other people, but it was nice to have someone he didn’t need to worry over impressing quite as much.

“Are you quite sure I haven’t intruded on your evening?” Phil asked again, after a bout of silence.

“ _‘Intruded on my evening?’_ Phil, your 19th century is showing. Here, I want to see if we can get the video games to work on both sides…”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> I didn't plan the story before writing, and I didn't change anything after it was written. It's just a stream of thought about Phil the ghost, really.  
> Let me know what I did well and what I can improve on--it all helps!


End file.
